USA > Massachusetts > Berkshire County > Pittsfield > First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Mass. : proceedings in commemoration of its one hundred and fiftieth anniversary, Feb. 7th and 8th, 1914 > Part 5
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Mr. Gregg has kindly relieved me of my Northamp- ton introduction to my speech. Northampton sent the
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aristocrat, John Stoddard, the magnificent, the "river god," who plotted out here his barony of twenty-four thousand acres. Northampton exiled to these western wastes her noblest and most famous son, before Berk- shire was Berkshire or Pittsfield was Pittsfield, John Stoddard's nephew, Jonathan Edwards, spiritual aris- tocrat. Northampton sent you her yeoman-born, Har- vard-bred, ardent young preacher of the Gospel of Christ, just at his majority, Thomas Allen, Spiritual Democrat, Thomas Allen, whom Catherine Sedgwick has called the "priest of the valiant heart, who served his people in the days of the oppression of the king." Thomas Allen, Professor Bliss Perry calls the " most picturesque figure in the history" of this American Piedmont; Thomas Allen, William Cullen Bryant said stood alone, or almost alone, among the New England clergy of his day as a defender of Jefferson and of political democracy.
Thomas Allen was the only one of the eight sons of his father and his famous mother, Betty Allen, who was named out of the New Testament. All the other seven were named from the Old Testament, and he ought to have been, too. He ought to have been Phineas or Joshua. Thomas was a misnomer, for no doubter was he, and there is no doubt about him. No man ever doubted his piety, no man ever doubted his patriotism, and no man ever doubted his politics.
My old aunt, I believe his only living grand-child, the youngest daughter and only surviving child of President William Allen, sends her benison from her quiet chamber to her friends, to the descendants and posterity of the congregation and parish that loved her ancestor. She told me this little incident of the last years of Thomas Allen, related by some old resident
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of Pittsfield. In his feebleness, one Sabbath he was in his high pulpit and below were spread the emblems of the communion meal. He became faint, and the deacons, the authorities of the church, rushed up to the pulpit to aid him, but his daughter-in-law, Mrs. Thomas Allen, Jr., who sat in the minister's pew, walked swiftly forward to the communion table, poured the wine from the chalice to the cup and carried it up -bold feminism of her day-to the pulpit, and " ad- ministered " the wine to the stricken man. Another incident is connected with Mrs. John Chandler Williams who has been already mentioned here to-night. The story runs that one day young Tommy Allen was seen in the street by his father's house horse-whipping one of his father's opponents, possibly a parishioner also, and Mrs. Williams looked from her house across the square and saw the transaction. Being an ardent defender of her pastor, seeing that the whip was becoming useless from excessive use, she brought him out a new horse whip, crying, " Lay on ! Tommy, lay on !" Old Thomas Allen, the father, came from out his parish house, and saw the situation, and mildly remarked, "Forbear! my son, forbear!" Young Thomas looked at his father and he looked at the lady; chivalry overcame filial obedience, and he obeyed the lady. I should like to leave this problem of ethics to the Bible class of the First Church. Did young Tommy obey the fifth commandment and honor his father, or did he not? There is just as much to be said for one side as the other.
Genealogy is a remarkably interesting game. You can get out of it just what you want. I sat down the other day with a lead pencil and multiplication table, and my first discovery was this :- that I had eight great grand-parents, four of them men, and four of
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them women. That's no novel situation. You have eight great grand-parents, and so has everybody. Adam had; no, Adam did not, but the multiplication table will upset the best system of theology. Of these eight great grand-parents, I find Thomas Allen a very highly satisfactory one to hark back to. He was all that a great grand-parent ought to be. He was picturesque. He was positive. He was prophetic.
I am not here to speak for the whole Allen gen- ealogy. I would refer you to that volume entitled " The Descendants of Elder John Strong, of North- ampton," but William Allen, his son, my grandfather, was a man of distinctly different type. In his day an apostle of peace as his father was the advocate of war, he was the leader of the American represent- atives to the great international peace conference held at Versailles in 1849. I hold in my hand a little testament that any doubting Thomas may examine afterwards, presented to the American delegates of the peace society by the English delegates, and signed by the honorable name of Richard Cobden.
William Allen followed his father in the pastorate of the Pittsfield church. He left this place and succeeded his father-in-law, John Wheelock, in the presidency of Dartmouth College. Dartmouth College was a fresh-water college,-always has been,-but just then it was a hot-water college in the days of the famous " case," and William Allen soon left the situation and went to Brunswick and Bowdoin College where he lived for twenty years, and then returned and spent his last thirty years in Northampton. So you see Northampton gave you Thomas Allen and took again William Allen. You have Thomas Allen coming, but we have William Allen going.
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Of the descendants of William Allen, I am here to speak for one daughter living. The full genealogical roster has worked out differently every time I have tried it. There are, I believe, nine grandchildren living, five of them Allens. The name of Allen dies out with my generation, the fourth from Thomas in the line of William. Fifteen, I think it's fifteen or sixteen, fifteen great grandchildren, and fifteen great great grandchildren of Thomas Allen now living, two of them living in Williamstown, some of them in Cuba, some of them in Kansas City, Worcester, Amherst and elsewhere, all up-to-date twentieth century children, vigorously practicing eugenics. I presume it's the way with all the other great grandchildren of Thomas Allen, the fighting parson of White Plains, Ticonderoga, and of Bennington.
Thomas Allen left five heirlooms, and I want you to go into executive session this evening as executors and help me in the disposal of these five treasures.
Item I. Two large, cut-glass, crystal decanters, assimilated by the fighting parson at the battle of Bennington from a Hessian surgeon. Where are those cut-glass decanters? I should be willing to exchange them for some valuable manuscript, which I have here and which I wish to present to the church a few moments later.
Item 2. A valuable parcel of real estate situated in or about the center of the town of Pittsfield. I believe your residents are familiar with its location and its later fortunes.
Item 3. A collection of manuscript of Thomas Allen's sermons, addresses, political editorials, etc. As to the sermons, they say there were two thousand seven hundred of them written in shorthand. That was a very shrewd thing for a clergyman of that day
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to do who wished to be thoroughly up-to-date and preserve to remote posterity his reputation for ortho- doxy. I have here also with these sermons a paper on Federalism. Here it is. It looks cool, but it's siz- zling from top to bottom, from center to circumfer- ence. I wish to present these papers in the name of the living descendants of William Allen to the church at Pittsfield. You know what to do with them better than any one else may. I fancy that there are among them facts which have not yet been covered in your written history. Certainly this remarkable paper on Federalism I have never seen quoted. Possibly you knew about it and never desired to quote it, but you are going to hear a little of it to-night before you get through, and I think a good deal of it is going to appear in the Springfield Republican before this cele- bration is concluded.
Item 4. A sample of old-fashioned, genuine New England piety. A reason, and it's not modesty either, forbids my saying just where this has gone to or disappeared to, but I fancy that my old Northampton aunt, his only surviving grand-daughter, might rightly claim, while she would never claim it for herself, if not the monopoly, at least all the available assets of this particular portion of his heirlooms.
Item 5. A brand of red-hot, Jeffersonian Dem- ocracy. Where did Thomas Allen come by his radical politics? How did it come that the New England parson, the person of the community, naturally allied to the well-to-do and the aristocrats of the community, with his theology supporting his most strenuous claims to supremacy over the non-elect, with every instinct of self-preservation, of theology, of tradition, and of social intercourse, that would ally him with the Federals, how came it about that Thomas Allen
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through his generation stood here unflinchingly the advocate of the idealism of the French Revolution and of Jeffersonianism? You may explain it possibly through the cropping out of original sin. I would prefer to regard it as the direct inspiration of the Almighty. I explain it thus. The man whose heart was fused and fixed in the principles of the Declaration of Independence was unchanged through his genera- tion. In the ebb tide and the compromise and the practical opportunism of his day, he held his absolute devotion to the principle upon which the nation was founded, which was pure democracy. I take it that the message of his day was that of a political prophet, which is just as essentially the message of our own day. Thomas Allen was a Lincoln republican. Well, that means nothing. Taft and Roosevelt and Wilson, Mark Hanna, and the Springfield Republican are all Lincoln republicans. That means American. But Thomas Allen was a Lincoln republican, and in his heart burned unquenchably the belief that the Federal- ism of his day-whether he was right or wrong isn't to the point, he believed it,-that the Federalism of his day was a compromise with aristocracy and with monarchy ; that the two logical forms are an out and out monarchy, and a democracy based upon the equal rights of all men, and this is the reason of his fervor, and the fury of his utterances. Federalism to him meant the little clique of aristocrats of the village or the State who claimed for themselves the authority and the power to administer the affairs of government for others. That was his belief, and in that belief he split your church in two. Was he right or wrong, politi- cally? I do not know any more than you do, but I believe that for this generation and for the next the attitude of Thomas Allen toward the State, and toward
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the social and the political aspect of the Kingdom of God are greatly needed.
Enough for politics. My last word to you is this : In that plain old meeting house on an April day in the last years of the eighteenth century, Thomas Allen stood before his congregation and preached the funeral sermon of his beloved daughter, Mrs. White, who had died in London a few months before. Would that I could quote it either literally or in spirit! He showed the soul of that exiled child of his, uttering her last farewell, speaking her words of courage to her own father who was then bowed breaking under the burdens of his controversy, speaking her farewell to her friends, and to her family; and then in conclusion he turns and speaks to her, a wondrous message from his own breaking father's heart, as he calls upon the angels to defend her, the Christ above to accept her, and the heavens to receive her spirit. So, after all the turmoil of politics, I would leave that last impression of the faithful parish priest, who baptized and married and buried the generations of this community, and who stood through all his days as the parson or the "person" of his parish.
ADDRESS BY HENRY M. HUMPHREY, ESQ., ON DR. HEMAN HUMPHREY
Introducing Mr. Henry M. Humphrey, the Pastor said:
The First Church in Pittsfield has many reasons to be grateful to Thomas Allen, and she is glad to have reason to thank this descendant of his not only for coming to us to bring this inspiring message, but also for giving to us these treasures of his, which now are
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to be ours, and shall ever be valued and prized. We thank him most heartily for his kindness and his generosity.
You heard this afternoon the beautiful tribute which Dr. Jenkins, in his address twenty-five years ago, paid to Dr. Heman Humphrey. With his words, we shall do well to remember a sentence at least of that which Dr. Todd has said of him, in his historical sermon preached in 1873. Dr. Todd said of Dr. Heman Humphrey, "He had more sanctified common sense than any man I ever met." A great deal there was in those plain words. We are fortunate and honored to-night in having with us a grandson of Heman Humphrey, Mr. Henry M. Humphrey, of New York, who now is to speak to us.
Mr. Humphrey said:
It is fifty-three years since Heman Humphrey died. It was fifty-three years previous to that time that he married Sophia Porter and settled in Fairfield, his first pastorate, from which he came to Pittsfield in 1817. Prof. David Swing said: "The block of time called fifty years is made more significant when they are formative years. To measure the value of moral influences one cannot call in as witnesses a few hours or days. At the end of a half century we may all venture to give an opinion for or against the applicant for remembrance." Heman Humphrey's block of fifty- three years were largely formative and sometimes sur- prisingly prophetic. About ninety years ago came his farewell address to the first missionaries of "the American Board" to the Sandwich Islands, now a part of the United States. Later an address on "Slavery"; ended in the United States soon after his death.
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From 1832 to 1834 Choctaw and Cherokee Indians were forced by the State of Georgia to emigrate, despite United States treaties and wonderful progress in civilization made by those Indians. It was a com- pleted defiance of the United States by a single State and an absolute nullification of United States treaties by the State of Georgia. His publishers state that Dr. Humphrey was the first who uttered remonstrances from the pulpit against Indian oppression. In 1829 Dr. Humphrey took up the cause of the Choctaws and Cherokees and delivered an address at Amherst, Hart- ford and other places, on "Indian Rights and Our Duties." I give extracts from that address.
"Shall I be told that 'all this is idle preaching' and that I have entirely mistaken the policy of Georgia in reference to the Cherokees-that she has no thought of compelling them to emigrate. I am astonished that such an expedient should be resorted to, to quiet the friends of the Indians and ward off public remon- strance. It is an insult offered to the common sense of the nation. What? Tell the Indians 'We want your country and you had better leave it-you can never be quiet and happy here?' and then because they do not take your advice, cut it up into counties, declare all their laws and usages, after a certain day, to be null and void, and substitute laws, which it is known they cannot live under ; and then turn round and coolly tell the world, 'Oh, we mean no compulsion. The farthest in the world from it! If these choose to stay why by all means let them remain where they are.'
"These are the tender mercies of which we shall undoubtedly learn more in due time.
"It amounts to this : 'You have got a fine farm and I want it. It makes a notch in the corner of mine. I will help you to move five hundred miles into the
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wilderness and there give you more and better land which you can cultivate and enjoy 'as long as grass grows and water runs' (these last words in quotation marks and Dr. Humphrey's foot-note, "Query, How long does water run in the region destined for the future residence of the Indians?"). 'You must go: however do just as you please. I shall never resort to any other compulsion, than just to lay you under certain necessary restrictions. Perhaps, for instance, as I am the strongest and you have more land than you want, I may take two-thirds or three-fourths of it from you ; but then there shall be no compulsion! Stay upon what is left if you choose. I may also find it necessary to ask you for your house, and if you should not give it up. I may be driven to the necessity of chaining you to a ring bolt and giving you a few salu- tary stripes-not to compel you to flee from your habitation, the moment you can get loose (for com- pulsion of all things I abhor) but just to induce you to emigrate willingly.'
"I maintain then, that it is the bounden duty of the General Government to protect the Indians, not only in the enjoyment of their country but of their laws. If it is possible for treaties to bind a nation in any case, then are we bound. If there is any such thing as public faith then is ours solemnly pledged to a single tribe, nearly twenty times over. If that pile of Indian treaties, now in the office of State, is anything more than a pile of frauds and insults, then the Government must interpose its strong arm to prevent aggression."
He was only about two years ahead of his time in all this.
He virtually concludes with :
"If such encroachments acquiesced in, do not pre- pare the way for putting shackles upon our children,
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they must be protected by higher munitions than con- stitutional bulwarks. This I am willing to leave upon record and run the risk of being laughed at for fifty years hence." He lived just long enough to see those whose names are on yonder monument shoulder the "higher munitions" for the preservation of the Union, thirty-two years after his prophecy.
He delivered the second annual address of the "American Sunday School Union."
His address against "Duelling" created a sensation. If I did not frequently pass the tomb of Alexander Hamilton I would not realize that such a code ever existed in the United States.
Along with these are his books and pamphlets and newspaper articles on issues and interests of Church, State, County, Town and personalities.
Foreign Missions have widened marvelously and yet from his "Letters to a Son in the Ministry," published in 1842, I sent two pages to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions and they thought them enough of a "forward movement" more than forty years after they were published, to copy and send at once to fifteen thousand ministers.
A speaker in 1911, not 18II, referred to the Amherst Collegiate Institute with the remarks "When Dr. Humphrey assumed the headship of this callow school the difficulties which beset the task seemed insurmountable. Many people were opposed to the founding and endowment of a new College in Massa- chusetts-was not Harvard sufficient?"
A few years ago I handed that Collegiate Institu- tion inaugural to a college president whom I believe second to none in his knowledge of the college curri- cula of Europe and the United States. He returned it
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to me with "Do you know that President Eliot of Har- vard has only just come to Dr. Humphrey's 1823 in- augural point of view ?"
President William T. Foster wrote "The Admini- stration of the College Curriculum" which when issued about three years ago by Houghton, Mifflin & Co., was welcomed for its thoroughness and up-to-dateness. One reviewer writes: "Harvard alone has upon her records the story of a half-century of elective studies. Some interesting and little known facts are recorded, notably the importance of several smaller colleges as pioneers of the elective system. Bowdoin and the University of Virginia were abreast with Harvard in taking about the year 1825, certain clear steps toward the broadening of the curriculum. At the same time Amherst went still further. In 1826 the Amherst faculty presented to the Governing Boards what President Foster does not hesitate to call 'an in- spired report' advocating a radical adoption of the elective method." President Foster says further "The report is an extraordinary document, at least half a century ahead of its time." This report of the Amherst faculty is two in one, the first part August 21, 1826, and the second December 5, 1826, signed "in behalf of the Faculty, H. Hum- phrey, Amherst College." One needs to read the whole report to realize its initiative, virility and also guarded quality. The President of the callow school of October, 1823, had by December, 1826, three years, begun to set the pace for the twentieth century, but none could be less conscious of its reach, except that in a sense, he profoundly believed in the eternal prin- ciples underlying all that he attempted.
On Easter morning in April, 1911, two handsome Tiffany windows were unveiled in the First Congre-
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gational Church of Fairfield, the gift of Mr. Saltus, in memory of Rev. Noah Hobart and Rev. Heman Hum- phrey, both former pastors. The address of Dr. Child on the life and work of Dr. Humphrey was masterly and is printed in full in the Bridgeport Standard of April 17, 1911. Dr. Child draws from the well known incidents and writings of Dr. Humphrey's life, but interweaves them with references to the formative years of Mr. Humphrey's pastorate in Fairfield and local continuing influence since.
To bring references to him down to this hundred and fiftieth anniversary week, I quote from The New York Times Book Review of last Sunday. A sub- scriber writes asking the value of "a copy of the 'New England Primer' with introduction by the Rev. Dr. H. Humphrey, President of Amherst College, printed in Worcester, and containing all the usual features of the earlier editions, also the 'Dialogue Between Christ, a Youth, and the Devil.' I know from the introduction that it was printed after 1823, but it is undated."
How do I, sixty-seven years his junior, remember him as he seemed to me at home in Pittsfield? I was present at the golden wedding; heard Dr. Todd and others speak, but remember little that was said except as I read their words later in life. I remember Dr. Humphrey as he looked at family prayers, preaching and in the daily round. I remember the squirrels in the great tree that was rooted partly in the Humphrey lot, partly in Mrs. O'Sullivan's and considerably in the East Street sidewalk. Also the little pile of stones just outside the porch door of his study, ready to use on squirrel-chasing dogs. I knew that he was working to have the town lots kept for Pittsfield boys free baseball
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grounds instead of being leased to circuses, and I tried to make him admit that he wrote the articles in the Eagle signed "An Old Baseball Player."
I remember that we "kept" Saturday after sun- down, and our football was placed for a rush with the last departing ray of Sunday and that our rush was sometimes premature, the result of a cloud or the like. As one of my cousins said "unkeeping" Sunday night was "like having an orange when you haven't had any- thing to eat all day." I remember Robert Pomeroy vividly as one of those who dropped in to help "unkeep" in quiet, friendly, cordial chat with Dr. Humphrey.
At that time prize fights, national and international, were held at "Chatham Four Corners," where the states meet and make quick transit from interruption easy. After the fight the principals and admirers would come to Pittsfield, to the old "Berkshire," and take the chances of being arrested by Sheriff Willis. Dr. Hum- phrey hated the demoralization of all the fights and the brutality of most of them, and was ready to give the law any moral or other required support, to sup- press them. One night after a big fight, Dr. Humphrey said at the supper table, "The train was late at Rich- mond and I had nothing to do but read the account of that terrible prize fight." How we boys chuckled, when by ourselves. "Grandfather reading that fight ! he liked it all right." No doubt we thought of it when he put the emphasis into such athletic metaphors of St. Paul as "So fight I, not as one that beateth the air."
Long before that he taught college students the value of a training which could make sinews and muscles like steel and hair as soft as an otter's fur, but his training took the direction of farm work, walk- ing, running and ball games rather than boxing. Am-
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herst was one of the first, probably the first college to take up athletics as training for the occupations of adult life.
A scrap book of Dr. Humphrey's writings in news- paper clippings has recently come into my possession. A few of them would in parts be called "preachy" or "pretty pious" but even that ministerial style of his time is full of his robust, original quality. I quote from his article in the "Culturist and Gazette" signed "East Street," of which the topic is "Shade Trees and Sidewalks."
"Without eulogizing this fast age in all of its enter- prises it seems to me we are not fast enough in beauti- fying our rapidly growing village when it can be done with so little expense. Our sidewalks are not near wide enough, and none of them are properly graded. On all our thoroughfares near the centre of our village, they ought to be at least eighteen or twenty feet wide. On North, South, East and West Streets, taking off twenty feet on each side would leave seventy-five feet for the travelled road. Now is the time to make sidewalks for future generations as well as ourselves. Very few vil- lages have so fine a soil or smooth and cheap sidewalks as Pittsfield. Instead of the clay which requires flagg- ing throughout, we have the fine gravel that when trodden, becomes almost as hard as a pavement and as dry in a few hours after a rain. Shall we have the trees, which might cost twenty-five cents apiece, set out and warranted for two years? Shall we carry out these and other improvements to beautify the village, attract the notice of strangers and induce gentlemen of sub- stance and character to come and settle among us ?"
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